16 research outputs found
Parents, children and the porous boundaries of the sexual family in law and popular culture
This article focuses on a perceived ideological overlap between popular cultural and judicial treatments of sex and conjugality that contributes to a discursive construction of parenthood and parenting. The author perceives that in both legal and popular cultural texts, there is a sense in which notions of ânaturalâ childhood are discursively constituted as being put at risk by those who reproduce outside of dominant sexual norms, and that signs of normative sexuality (typically in the form of heterosexual coupling) may be treated as a sign of safety. These ideas are rooted in ancient associations between fertility, sexuality and femininity that can also be traced in the historical development of the English language. With the help of commentators such as Martha Fineman, the article situates parents and children within a discourse of family which prioritises conjugality, with consequences for the ways in which the internal and external boundaries of families are delineated
A hybrid column generation and constraint programming optimizer for the tail assignment problem
Tail Assignment is the problem of assigning flight legs to aircraft while satisfying all operational constraints, and optimizing some objective function. In this article, we present a hybrid column generation and constraint programming solution approach. This approach can be used to quickly produce solutions for operations management, and also to produce close-to-optimal solutions for long and mid term planning scenarios. We present computational results which illustrate the practical usefulness of the approach
LÀrares tal och barns nyfikenhet: Kommunikation om naturvetenskapliga innehÄll i förskolan
The aim of this thesis is to generate new knowledge about how children and teachers
communicate scientific contents in preschool. The general research question is formulated as:
How do the object of learning and the act of learning appear in communication about
scientific contents in preschool? This thesis is a collection of three (previously published)
empirical studies and takes shape in the encounter between a projected knowledge acquisition
task for preschool and the educational tradition of preschool.
The research approach is based primarily on phenomenography focussing on developmental
pedagogy. The results are discussed in relation to situated learning and the assumptions about
the task of preschool characterising the social practice that is brought to light. The thesis is
based on the assumption that teachers are bearers of taken-for-granted ideas about what the
âgood preschoolâ is, and that these ideas affect the way they interpret new tasks.
The empirical basis consists of video observations from two preschools working with
different thematic projects: Life in the tree stump and How soil is formed. The analysis is delimited
to the verbal communication occurring between children and teachers about the scientific
content. The children are aged between three and six years. All observations have been
transcribed to text and analysed according to the following research questions: Study I: (i)
What is communicated as the object of learning in the theme work about natural scientific
phenomena in the preschool studied? (ii) What acts of learning appear in the communication
of the object of learning? Study II is a re-analysis of the linguistic usage in the empirical data
from Study I. Research questions of Study II are: is there any systematic pattern in the use of
anthropomorphic speech regarding (i) who uses this language, (ii) when it is used and (iii) what
it is used for? Study III is delimited to childrenâs perspective, and the research questions are:
(i) What do children ask about during theme work with a natural scientific process in
preschool? (ii) Can any tendency towards change be discerned with regard to what kind of
questions children ask in the course of the theme work?
The results have thrown light on what natural science is in these preschools, a questioning
teacher, an education ideal as an interpretative framework and childrenâs meeting with the
object of learning. The results are discussed in relation to a feasible didactic perspective based
on the educational ideal of preschool and in relation to a critical didactic perspective
concerning teachersâ will, courage and competence to make the content visible. Finally, with
the implementation of the raised knowledge task for preschool in mind, prominence is given
to the need of critical reflection over the role of language as maintaining a discourse and the
concepts established.Susanne Thulin Àr medlem av den Nationella Forskarskolan i Barndom, lÀrande, Àmnesdidaktik (FoBa). Föreliggande avhandling Àr den första doktorsavhandling som publiceras i anslutning till forskarskolan